Hey I’m going to do a Brad and complain about a platform I don’t use - I recently found out that you cannot change your PSN tag? Like at all? Holy crap, I thought it was lame that MS charges you for the privilege, but not even being able to just seems nuts!
Oh but hey, there an interesting thread over on NeoGAF that says that Switch users will need to log into Xbox Live in order to play Minecraft. Possibly this was Sony’s objection?
That’s theory doesn’t hold up given that they’ve done cross-platform play before.
Supporting this feature isn’t free, it’s extra work. Given that Sony is #1 by a mile and implementing it will actually hurt their business, they aren’t doing it. They want people to buy Call of Duty: The Alamo on Playstation, not Xbone, so they get their license fees.
And yet the ultimate result is still that Sony made a particularly poor excuse for being the odd man out, got called out for it, and looks even worse as a result than they already did from the “everyone except Sony is teaming up for this sweet consumer-positive gamer-positive (won’t someone think of the GAMERS???) thing” narrative.
It’s certainly not going to be the single thing that sinks the PS4’s future, but it’s one of many ways Sony has decided to squander all the Gamer Goodwill™ they built up at the beginning of the generation.
This won’t cross play is clearly about just being hard asses with MS. They let PS4s do it on Rocket League with PC and going all,the way back on Final Fantasy XI which I think was the PS2. So they do it but just won’t let a PS get anywhere near an Xbox.
It’s sounding like MS is requiring a Live login, so on Switch you are logging in with your XBL account to play. I think this may be what’s really tripping up Sony and why Nintendo would be ok with it since they don’t really do/get online services.
Hahahahah
Hopefully it works with XBL Silver!
That makes sense for Minecraft, but surely that wouldn’t be a requirement for Rocket League, would it?
Needing a Live account to play online Minecraft across devices makes perfect sense, since your DLC and worlds are carried across all non-Sony devices. There’s no way that’s required for Rocket League, though they could require an account of their own.
I don’t think that’s true. These games aren’t being run on Sony’s servers, or anything like that; the actual game developer is doing all the work both on the code and operations. All Sony would need to do is approve cross-play. The Rocket League developers have stated as much. It seems to be purely a predatory business decision, there’s no reason to believe there’s even a remotely good technical reason behind it.
They designed their database and API such that the username was the primary key. Rather than separating the user ID and the displayed ID, like many other gaming services do. So it’s not that they’re lazy or incompetent, or anything like that. It’s just that they made an unfortunate decision 15 years ago, and can’t fix it just by changing their own systems. They’d also need all the third party developers using their API in their games to switch to a new API.
Even if the developers shoulder all the connectivity and whatnot, it would certainly increase their support costs.
Yes, that’s apparently exactly how it works and I can see why Sony doesn’t want to hand over their entire Minecraft player-base so they can start getting Xbox ads in their email every week. I can’t imagine MS would ever agree to the reverse, either.
Guess Nintendo’s ok with it though.
How things have changed in 5 years and how they are sure to change again. Enjoy the fleeting moment of being on the top Sony.
I think Cross-play is a good thing for gamers and developers.
Is also good for Auna, the ISP company I pay so I can play online games.
For gamers is good because more players mean (hopefully) short matchmaking times. It also open the possibility of maybe my cousin is playing Minecraft in the PS4, I buy the windows store version and play with him.
For developers is better (but can make things harder) because it means a obscure game can have a bigger public. So this multiplayer game can have a lot of players in PS4 despite selling poorly in the PS4, because theres a lot of PC gamers.
For Aunacable, my ISP, is good, because to play multiplayer games online, I pay then money, and they make sure that my TCP/IP packets get to the backbone of the internet, and the TCP/IP packets of the other players (in this peer2peer game architecture where the games are hosted in the consoles) meet my machine.
Is not a perfect thing.
For Nintendo, is a challenge, because they want a environment where is simply impossible for kids to get exposed to anything nasty.
For developers is a challenge because a more complex environment and problems that are hard to replicate, different schedules and requirements, trying to meet different opposite demands.
I don’t think theres much of a downside for the ones like Sony and Microsoft. They of course are the ones making complicated systems the developers would have to meet. But they already do that, probably,for other things, is basically their role.
Cross-play should be encouraged for small games, and games like Minecraft where you want the whole family to at least be able to play together. I don’t see it has neccesary in games like Battlefield, but seems to be a nice-to-have feature in games like “Car Footbal” and “Medieval Fighting Guys Game”.
The Rocket League devs pipe in.
Portable Rocket League, online or off, with multiple system crossplay is pretty amazing when I think about it.
Looks like it’s the same situation with Ark. When asked about cross-play the dev said this:
Fortnite from Epic apparently had PS4/Xbox One cross-play over the weekend.
Oops. Sorry we accidentally enabled a great feature for this sort of game! Our bad!
I’m not sure what people expect…why on earth would you want to allow your competitor, that has a smaller market share, to have direct access to all of your customers? That’s sort of braindead business move 101. The idea that it’s going to spur enough “good will” to offset the downsides seems a bit silly.
Consumers are much more likely to buy a platform that their friends are playing on, if you take away that motivation, you take away one of your strong points, and that’s market share. /shrug. The snowball effect for platforms is incredibly important, especially as it relates to multiplayer.